She looks impossibly small, like a bee-sized human. The large-format Lego blocks she’s been plopped beside make her already slight dimensions appear positively lilliputian. Even the other babies around her seem giant in comparison. None are older than 18 months and only one appears capable of walking, but a couple seem twice her height. I remind myself that in any other context these other children would themselves seem self-evidently tiny, but placed in context with our daughter, they look like they could help me with my car insurance or do my taxes.
The waterworks haven’t started yet, but the childminder asks me to set up a WhatsApp group with her, my wife and I, that will let us know as soon as they do. We hover anxiously, until she politely tells us we should go. At her request, we slink out of the door without looking back, feeling like we’ve placed an incendiary device in her home.
Our daughter is not yet 10 months old, but since my wife is set to return to work next month, we have begun the process of snipping the apron strings. We found a lovely childminder who looks after six babies in her family home a few streets away from our own. She is as calm, kind and entirely unfussed by the job ahead of her, as we are shellshocked and appalled by what we’re doing.
It’s not just that our daughter is small and clingy – and she is both of those things – it’s that cutting the apron strings seems manifestly absurd. This is not the first time we’ve introduced a baby to a nursery setting. It is exactly the second time that this has happened and we appear to remember nothing. To have learned nothing.
When we did this with our son four years ago, it was at a childminder’s a few miles from our old house, so we decamped to a nearby coffee shop to wait it out, knowing we’d likely have to return sooner than it would take us to get there and back from our home. Now, we’re doing it all again, but at a venue that is barely even a three-minute walk from our house, but to go home seems flippant. Blasphemous, even. So, we make an entirely unnecessary vigil to a coffee shop nearby and sit with our thoughts. No alert comes in from the WhatsApp group that we’re definitely not already checking. We decide to go home.
For the first time since she was born, we walk into our house together to find no buggy greeting us in the hall. For an hour, we loiter like guests in our own home, pleased but anxious about the silence. I head to Soho for work and exit the station to a flurry of notifications revealing our daughter is upset, should be picked up, and indeed has been. My wife texts to say she is home after her first two hours of apron detanglement. The waterworks may have started, but they weren’t our own… and we’re calling that a success.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
